The Stress of School By Rachel Raffino

A recent text message from a good friend of mine made me realize something about school. The text started with “you stress way too much over school in my opinion.” I then responded “if I stressed too much I wouldn’t have a b- in math right now.” He answered with “it’s good you want to get all A’s, but if you try your best and you don't get an A, why punish yourself?” And this is when I realized he was right.

Five days a week, I go to school for seven and half hours then come home study, and do homework for countless hours. I study until my brain is exhausted and I can hardly hold my pencil anymore. But I still manage to get grades that I am not pleased with on some assignments. My mentality states that if it’s not an A or higher, I don’t want the grade at all. But what was pointed out to me in that text, was that my standards are too high, and it’s okay to not be perfect in all subjects at all times.

Another point I would like to discuss is how high America’s standards are in general, and how little it helps us perform in school. The stress put on students in the US is outrageous. However Finland has a completely different take on schooling and does better in school than the USA. News.stanford.edu states “Finnish students have ranked at or near the top of the Program for International Student Assessment ever since testing started in 2000. In the most recent assessment in 2009, they ranked sixth in math, second in science and third in reading. By comparison, U.S. students ranked 30th, 23rd and 17th, respectively, of the 65 tested countries/economies.” Here is a chart I created to compare America's school system to Finland’s.

America	Finland
Kids start school at age 3-4	Kids start school at age 7
Heavy homework load	Light to no homework
Tons of standardized testing	Little standardized testing
College is thousands of dollars each year	Little or no tuition fees for higher education

*statistics from Greatschools.org

Finally, it has been brought to my attention that the average classroom has not changed since the 1900’s. People complain how you can customize cars, shoes, phones etc., but school is the same for every child. A famous quote by Albert Einstein says “everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid.” Some kids aren’t good at math, or English, or history, and are judged and tested ruthlessly anyway. School remains consistent, but every brain varies.